Baedeker for the Future

Wendell Willkie saw his trip last year to the Middle East and Asia as a trip into the future. This week, in a book-length report called One World (Simon & Schuster; $2), he sets forth the guideposts he found.

The most significant arrows were in Russia. Willkie did none of the currently fashionable blinking at the fact that Russia is a dictatorship. He looked at the signs with cool, unsentimental eyes, and noted three significant points:

> "First, Russia is an effective society. It works. It has survival value. The record of Soviet resistance to Hitler has been proof enough of this. . . ."

> "Second, Russia is our ally in this war." Russian "hatred of Fascism and the Nazi system is real and deep and bitter."

> "Third, we must work with Russia after the war. At least it seems to me that there can be no continued peace unless we learn to do so. . . . For Russia is a dynamic country, a vital new society, a force that cannot be bypassed in any future world."

Communism's Answer. Adds Wendell Willkie:

"Many among the democracies fear and mistrust Soviet Russia. They dread the inroads of an economic order that would be destructive of their own. Such fear is weakness. Russia is neither going to eat us nor seduce us. That is ... unless our democratic institutions and our free economy become so frail through abuse and failure in practice as to make us soft and vulnerable. The best answer to Communism is a living, vibrant, fearless democracy--economic, social, and political. All we need to do is to stand up and perform according to our professed ideals. Then those ideals will be safe. . . .

"I believe it is possible for Russia and America ... to work together for the economic welfare and the peace."

But some kind of solid working agreement with Russia, says Traveler Willkie, is not enough. The whole world, he found, is in a revolutionary ferment which can be resolved -- with powerful, genuinely democratic guidance--into a great peace. This is a "war of liberation.... The world is awake, at last, to the knowledge that the rule of people by other peoples is not freedom, and not what we must fight to preserve. ... In Africa, in the Middle East, throughout the Arab world, as well as in China and the whole Far East, freedom means the orderly but scheduled abolition of the colonial system. Whether we like it or not, this is true."

Democracy's Answer. Yet the great peace did not yet seem to be in the making. All the way from West Africa to Chungking, Willkie found "worry and doubt in the hearts and minds of people behind the fighting fronts. They were searching for a common purpose. . . . The whole world seemed . . . ready for incredible sacrifices if only they could see some hope that those sacrifices would prove worth while."

The one great signpost which Willkie saw required courage to follow. Says he:

"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin. . . .

"America must choose one of three courses after this war: narrow nationalism, which inevitably means the ultimate loss of our own liberty; international imperialism, which means the sacrifice of some other nation's liberty; or the creation of a world in which there shall be an equality of opportunity for every race and every nation. . . .

"Three things seem to me necessary--first, we must plan now for peace on a world basis; second, the world must be free, politically and economically, for nations and for men, that peace may exist in it; third, America must play an active, constructive part in freeing it and keeping its peace."

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